Mark Shields

Friday night's pundit segment on the PBS NewsHour began in a predictable way, as both pseudoconservative David Brooks and liberal Mark Shields rained fire on President Trump declaring a national emergency to secure federal funding for a border wall. But after both pundits agreed that Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg was "impressive," Brooks was gently asked if the Democrats were getting too progressive, and he dropped a bomb. They were "somewhere to the left of Che Guevara."

On Friday's PBS NewsHour, liberal analyst and columnist Mark Shields took a position for civility, arguing that Kavanaugh critics on the Left shouldn't be protesting after the fight has ended. The Supreme Court is too important for ongoing agitation:

New York Times columnist David Brooks expressed public disagreement with his editorial-page bosses on Friday night's All Things Considered on NPR. He didn't directly mock their choice to publish an anonymous "senior administration official" bragging about how they keep President Trump in check from his worst impulses. He just mocked the official: "It was a stupid act. You know, if you're going to be protecting the president from himself, don't tell him. And so, you know, it's going to make him be much more erratic and much more willful in the face of White House aides."

Liberals try to play quite a game with special counsel Robert Mueller. When he indicts Russians, analysts like Mark Shields on PBS start making jokes about how Trump's summit with Putin will be a "campaign reunion" with Trump's "favorite absentee voter." But when anyone suggests Mueller's probe is partisan -- or leads to partisan smack-talk -- they suggest it's nonsense, that "there's not a partisan corpuscle in Bob Mueller's system."

The PBS NewsHour interviewed Bill Clinton and his co-author James Patterson over two nights. On Friday night, Judy Woodruff asked liberal analyst Mark Shields about Patterson's insistence that we elect serious people to office (translation: no Trumps), which allowed Shields to launch into a tribute to Clinton, who "courageously raised taxes...and produced an economy that produced 22 million new jobs." The Clintons really should have paid him a gratuity.

Liberal PBS NewsHour analyst Mark Shields is one of those journalists who refuse to admit there’s any context to President Trump describing criminal aliens like MS-13 gang members as “animals.” On Friday’s news roundup, Shields protested "you have got the leader of one party calling people animals."

PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff asked her regular Friday pundits David Brooks and Mark Shields to evaluate the Robert Mueller probe after a year. Shields, for his part, took out a verbal baseball bat and began attacking House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes as not only stupid and immature, but as the 21st century equivalent of Joe McCarthy:

PBS and NPR both use New York Times columnist David Brooks as their one "house conservative" to assess the week in review on Fridays. And both know that isn't the slightest bit accurate. On Friday on PBS, Brooks declared it was "menacing" for the 2020 census to once again ask people if they are a citizen of the United States. On NPR, Brooks even made anchorman Ari Shapiro laugh by saying of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, "their Trump is better than our Trump" at "blowing up the system" in Europe.

On Friday's PBS NewsHour, David Brooks, who is somehow described as the Republican or conservative half of the pundit panel, dismissed the ascent of men liked by the conservative movement as the worst kind of public servants, the C or D level of Republican aides, because they're too ideological. Larry Kudlow is just the "worst," and John Bolton is "anything but neutral on anything."

On Friday's weekly roundup on the PBS Newshour, after analyst David Brooks said the Trump White House has a "perpetual unraveling" of staff, liberal analyst Mark Shields compared it to people trying to escape the Berlin Wall, where escapees were often killed by communist guards. "This White House is resembling nothing as much as East Berlin, in that there's more people trying to get out than there are trying to get in."

With statewide elections on Tuesday in Virginia and New Jersey, the PBS NewsHour week-in-review segment strangely focused on Democrats for a change. Liberal analyst Mark Shields shocked PBS anchor Judy Woodruff by saying if Virginia’s Democratic candidate for governor, Ralph Northam, can’t defeat Republican Ed Gillespie with his alleged Trump baggage, there will be "close to civil war within the Democratic Party."

PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff recently boasted her show rose above "a false sense of combativeness." So when their week-in-review segment airs on Fridays, typically no one stands up for the conservative side as liberal NewsHour analyst Mark Shields combatively whacks at Republican officials as the worst kind of political villains and vandals. On Friday, Shields responded to efforts to curtail Obamacare by quoting an old Democrat that "any jackass can kick down a barn...that's what they're about, dismantling." But David Brooks actually disagreed.

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